Adrienne's Reviews > Chronicles of the Black Company

Any book that makes me want to drop my relatively comfortable life to join a mercenary company with at best a fluid sense of morality is doing something right. I'd be signing up for long marches through snow and mud, for following orders (no questions asked), and for the occasional massacre, and frankly, that's not normally me. Huh.

I did not expect to like this book as much as I did! I was pleasantly surprised. I accidentally began reading the second compilation of books in this series (The Books of the South) before this one, but I quickly realized that it seemed that I was missing a lot of information. So I did a quick google search, learned that it was the second in the series, and trekked over to my local independent bookstore to buy a copy of the Chronicles of the Black Company. And I am glad that I did!

Unfortunately, this meant that I had some little snippets of information about the outcome of the first compilation. That wasn't really too much of a problem, as the first book in The Chronicles of the Black Company (The Black Company) is quite confusing in the beginning since you're thrown into the action without any explanation. The book really only got interesting for me once the Lady showed up, and maybe 50 pages or so after that I was sold. The next two books - Shadows Linger and The White Rose - only got better. So enjoyable, in fact, that I missed my bus stop once while reading a very suspenseful part and that I found myself scheming about how to make time to to curl up with a warm blanket and keep reading.

The characters and their interactions in this book are really its selling point. Yes, there are sorcerers and magic and powerful hero/villain types - but they aren't narrating. Instead, we follow Croaker, the physician and Annalist for the Black Company (and a bit of a tongue-tied romantic with a dry sense of humor), an infamous group of mercenary soldiers who hire themselves out to the highest bidder. Of course, that sometimes means that they're working for the wrong side. It also means that most of the characters we encounter in the Black Company are morally ambiguous, which is exactly one of the things I like in a fantasy novel. From time to time we see how they come to terms with their not-always-respectable actions. On the other hand, most of the time they're real people (okay, well, feared mercenaries) doing what real people do (okay, except for the times that they do things I could never picture myself doing and, you know, all those battles). All in all it's a very different perspective for a fantasy story.

I would have preferred more description about the world in the collection as a whole, as I certainly couldn't picture the settings at all from the writing. Occasionally we'll hear about a beautiful sunset, but nothing about what the cities or surrounding areas actually look like. But I was okay with that; I could chalk it up to Croaker - it just isn't what he wanted to talk about.

I wasn't always sure of the Lady's motives throughout the story, especially concerning Croaker, but hey. That was okay. There were also a few standard fantasy-type cliches, but not as many as in most epic fantasy stories. For example, we had an all-seeing eye (cough, eye of Sauron, cough?) and names hold power over people, but I was willing to overlook those things (unlike the flying carpets.. ugh!).

In any case, I plowed through this book in about a week and then immediately jumped right in to The Books of the South. I imagine I will definitely be rereading The Chronicles of the Black Company in the future.